As the amount and complexity of software in mobile communications devices increases there is an increasing need for manufacturers, service providers and software developers to maintain the mobile device configuration and its software components after the manufacturing phase. For example, selling add-on applications or commercial content to users of mobile devices ideally requires compatibility checking and management of the interrelated dependencies of the software modules. While providing generic profile or model information of the device may be sufficient for relatively simple content delivery (e.g., such as a music download), for application installations and particularly for firmware updates it is essential to obtain detailed mobile device information in order to correctly select delivery versions and download packages. In many cases, however, these important details are not known to the user, and/or are not visible to the user through the user interface.
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has standardized a set of service enablers to fulfill the needs of device management and downloads of digital products. However, many of the standards are quite tightly focused on the mobile domain, and thus integrating them as architectural components into a more generic digital delivery system entity is not straightforward.
In many cases the use of digital delivery for mobile devices is e-commerce oriented. As such, in addition to technical level device management tasks there are several user level aspects such as demand creation, menu browsing, selection, commitment and payment.
A natural technology choice, and the current defacto method for implementing the user interface, is through web technologies, particularly HTTP browsing and web applications. Thus, any attempt to address the problems discussed above should ideally be compatible and inter-operate with existing and future web-related technologies, including web browsers.
General reference with respect to updating a user can be made to the following U.S. Patents, all by Richard R. Reisman: U.S. Pat. No. 5,694,546, “System for Automatic Unattended Electronic Information Transport Between a Server and a Client by a Vendor Provided Transport Software with a Manifest List”; U.S. Pat. No. 6,125,388, “System for Transporting Information Objects Between a User Station and Multiple Remote Sources Based upon User Modifiable Object Manifest Stored in the User Station”; U.S. Pat. No. 6,594,692 B1, “Methods for Transacting Electronic Commerce”; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,658,464 B2, “User Station Software that Controls Transport, Storage, and Presentation of Content from a Remote Source”.